O twinkling path that loops across the air / A carriageway for minds to think and share #iAMb Any good? @fleurhills
— Katharine Towers (@TowersKatharine) February 14, 2017
A far superior iAMb for this week from a proper poet – invoking communities and networks
O twinkling path that loops across the air
A carriageway for minds to think and share
This post is linked to this one.
@TowersKatharine Can you or anyone in ur poetry community compose a line or two of iambic pentameters on *community*? for my studies? #iAMb
— Cathy Hills (@fleurhills) February 13, 2017
affinities transmitted network to
network sparking synaptic sympathies #iAMb— Cathy Hills (@fleurhills) February 12, 2017
The lines have ten syllables but they don’t scan. Never mind, it was an attempt to encapsulate this week’s thoughts on networks, connections and communities. It reminded me slightly of The New Mobilities Paradigm, an article full of visions of networks, fluidity, sudden flights and resettlings, circulation and points of stasis. The paper is a description of an emerging paradigm in social studies and voices not only the more romantic or commercial rhetoric surrounding networks and connection, but speaks, too, of the necessary static and immutable infrastructure that enables them. It is a reaction against sedentarist theories and details how commodities of every kind are “on the move”. The paper evokes feelings of time and hurry for me too with its evocations of dynamic, contingent, emergent and ephemeral communities and happenings.
A much better network iAMb posted subsequently.
testing and not just for the sake of it #iAMb
— Cathy Hills (@fleurhills) February 3, 2017
Testing ifttt for my Week in iAMbs tweets.
I had an idea to summarise the week in iambic pentamaters, or at least one. Not exactly contemporary digital culture perhaps! It’s called #iAMb because the i confers a more up-to-date image it might otherwise not claim, in a corporate, Silicon Valley kind of way and co-constitutes the question-statement-proposition I AM. (Who we are as humans has been a theme of EDC so far.) The b is silent, it’s the parasitic worm code and/or the unrevealed element in the sociotechnical mix and/or power’s concealed cipher.
Warning – I’m no poet!
Testing and not just for the sake of it
This week’s iAMb hangs on the word testing. I’m thinking here of testing boundaries – the blurred boundaries we have been thinking of in the first EDC block, such as between the human and the machine, between education and learning or education and technology. Testing boundaries is what we are doing in this experimental learning space. Education and learning are all about testing, hypotheses and understandings, experiments and prototypes. Testing has connotations, too, of how education is a testing of ourselves, and perhaps necessarily so, to enable us to move forward.
Not just for the sake of it could mean that this testing is important, to me here, and to humans in general. We are testing the boundary of human technological perfectability and sinister outcomes of Artificial Intelligence. This testing matter is important and education is a means of giving voice to individuals to which this public learning space attests.
The predominance of monosyllables makes the sentence sound a bit robotic and the choice of and and not but after testing marks a pause, but less of one, to simulate the pace of life on the internet.
Of course, I was just really testing ifttt to see if it would work with another hashtag :).